David Sibbet

Facilitation Mastery: Experiencing the Four Flows

“I didn’t appreciate that we would be doing so much personal development” one participant said in our closing circle at the Facilitation Mastery Workshop, held recently at Islandwood Conference Center on Bainbridge Island in Washington. “The way you and Laurie showed up made it possible,” another said. “This was transformational for me,” another said.

I’m still deeply moved by the experience I just completed, and so is the group. We are all communicating still through a Base Camp web site Grove Sr. Associate Tom Benthin (who attended the workshop) set up for everyone. Poems and reflections are flying!

Inventing the Future of Management--Initial Insights

I have a little distance on the amazing gathering that I facilitated recently with Gary Hamel and his MLab team called “Invent the Future of Management.” McKinsey, the strategy consulting firm, co-sponsored the event along with the London Business School, and MLab, Gary’s new non-profit venture focused on catalyzing collaboration and contribution to the field which has been his life— leadership and management of organizations—businesses in particular.

He gathered 30 leaders in management development, education, consulting, and the CEOs of Whole Foods, Gore, Ideo, Google, and HCL (one of the fastest growing IT companies in India). His gathering question was “why can’t we bring as much innovation, adaptation, and engagement to our organizations as we do to our development of products and technologies?”

P&G's Visualization Wall Revolutionizes Retail Design Prototyping

Franz Dill, a Procter & Gamble colleague from the Groupware Users Project that The Grove and the Institute for the Future Conducted all during the 1990s, has been freed to write about P&G innovation center that he helped create in Cincinnati by the publication of AG Lafley's new book: 'The Game Changer: How You can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation ...' 

Franz describes a 24 projector wall that allowed P&G to simulate any shelving scheme for review by customers. You can be assured I can imagine all kinds of other applications for this kind of visualization!!! Enjoy Franz's post. He's also tracking a lot of other interesting things.

Click here to read Dill's "P&Gs Beckett Ridge Innovation Center"

TED BIG VIZ Book and Movie are LIVE!!

You can download the TED2008-BigViz Book and see an amazing Movie of the 700 plus illustrations Kevin Richards and I did for Big Viz (see stories below). It's a BIG file, but amazing to see. Enjoy.

Srategizing with Visual Metaphors

As the rain and winds ripped trees down in our backyard and beside the Grove in our first serious winter storm, I ended up my VizThink web-conference exhilarated, and thinking a lot about visual analogies and metaphors. (To hear the entire program click “Visualizing Change: Creating the Future One Vision at a Time” here). My reflection was sparked by a question moderator Tom Crawford passed along from one of the 53 people participating. “What role does the third dimension play in your Storymaps?” I illustrated my answer with the tablet sketch below, but let me elaborate.

Leading Change: The Role of Serious Play

2007 is almost over, and a weaving of insights for the new year is already beginning, fueled by a good studio day of just letting things arise, and several visits with good friends and counselors. The twin themes of “prototyping” and “leadership” are starting to dance together in a wonderfully hopeful way.

Simulate to Innovate
Let me start with the prototyping theme. Casting over my library (the one I keep at my home studio focused on the projects I am developing) Michael Schrage’s book on Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) popped into my hand. My colleague, Ed Claassen got it for The Grove library several years ago. I took it home, knowing that there was a connection between prototyping, play, and what we do at The Grove with interactive graphic communications and groups.

Grove Gallery Finished in Third Life

I have finished building out a Grove Gallery on an island sim in Second Life called Third Life Lab.  The Grove is collaborating with Gary Merrill, one of our consulting associates to create this space dedicated to exploring the relationship between virtual worlds and real life, with an eye toward increasing our sense of interrelatedness and appreciation of natural systems.

Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance

Jay Cross has done a wonderful job of surveying the new field of knowledge work and what those of us in the 21st Century are doing to help people truly learn in groups and organization. He takes inspiration for the title from the work of the Institute for Research on Learning (now part of Far West Labs) that found that informal, social learning was the most powerful for bringing about real change and development. This work sparked the communities of practice movement among others. 

The book has a wonderful chapter on my work at National Semiconductor in the early 1990's with numerous graphics.

Informal Learning--Featuring The Grove's work at National Semiconductor.

Also, check out Jay's Internet Time web site  or  his Center for Visual Learning.

 

Future Forces Map

I was working on a new exhibition for my Second Life studios and came across this graphic that I created with Lenny Lind, Meryem LeSaget, John O'Connell, and Sandra Florstedt in a Change Agent's Cafe meeting in 2003. It was our 20th one or thereabouts, and we were all still reeling from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. All of our clients seemed buffeted by the forces of change. As a complement to the hopeful post about Coro below, I'm including this to point at the very real turbulence that provides context for everyone's work and life. These are times of change, to be sure. They abound with potential for creativity and forward movement, but the risks are high. This map shows the future forces we were aware of, and on the right, some of the hopeful actions that we thought we could take in face of them. If you want a big version of this graphic, you can download it by clicking on this link. FutureForces2003.pdf.

National Semiconductor Turnaround Case

I found this original graphic of National Semiconductor's strategic vision in my files and was prompted to tune up the extensive case study of how The Grove used large scale graphics to successfully deploy the NSC vision worldwide over four years in the early 1990s. It is the most extensive application of Grove Storymapping™ to date, and the success model for much of our current work. Check out the National Semiconductor Turnaround Case under articles to see the full presentation.